then on the other. Mrs Curtis it was who prescribed the honey-plaster for a sore throat. “Put on a honey-plaster, neighbour dear; that will draw the misery out of you.” And Mrs Curtis it was who, having quarrelled with another neighbour, came to my father to relate her wrongs: “Me a poor lone widow woman, and she ha’ got a father to protect her.” The said father was old James Burrows, already spoken of, who was over ninety, and had long been bedridden.
Mrs Mullinger was a strange old woman. People said she had an evil eye; and if she took a dislike to any one and looked evilly at their pigs, then the pigs would fall ill and die. Also, when she lived next door to another cottage, with only a wall dividing the two chimneys, if old Mrs Mullinger sat by her chimney in a bad temper, no one on the other side could light a fire, try as they might.
Phœbe Smith and her husband Sam lived in one of the downstair rooms. At one time of her life Phœbe kept a little dame’s school on the Green. One class of her children, who were reading the Miracles, were called “Little Miracles”; and whenever my father went in, “Little Miracles” were called up by that name to read to him. Old Phœbe had intelligence above the common; she read her Bible much, and thought over it. She was fond, too,
of having my sister read hymns to her, and would often lift her hands in admiration at any passage she particularly liked. She commended a cotton dress my sister had on one day when she went to see her—a blue Oxford shirting, trimmed with a darker shade. “It is a nice solemn dress,” she said, as she lifted a piece to examine it more closely; “there’s nothing flummocky about it.”
Among the other Guildhall people were old Mrs “Ratty” Kemp, widow of the Rat-catcher; [31] old one-eyed Mrs Bond, and her deaf son John; old Mrs Wright, a great smoker; and Mrs Burrows, a soldier’s widow, our only Irishwoman, from whom Monk Soham conceived no favourable opinion of the Sister Isle. Of people outside the Guildhall I will mention but one, James Wilding, a splendid type of the Suffolk labourer. He was a big strong man, whose strength served him one very ill turn. He was out one day after a hare, and a farm-bailiff, meeting him, tried to take his gun; James resisted, and snapped the man’s arm. For this he got a year in Ipswich jail, where, however, he learnt to read, and formed a strong attachment for the chaplain, Mr Daniel. Afterwards, whenever any of us were driving over to Ipswich, and James met us, he would always say, “If yeou see Mr
Daniel, dew yeou give him my love.” Finally, an emigration agent got hold of James, and induced him to emigrate, with his wife, his large family, and his old one-legged mother, to somewhere near New Orleans. “How are you going, Wilding?” asked my father a few days before they started. “I don’t fare to know rightly,” was the answer; “but we’re goin’ to sleep the fust night at Debenham” (a village four miles off), “and that’ll kinder break the jarney.” They went, but the Southern States and the negroes were not at all to their liking, and the last thing heard of them was they had moved to Canada.
So James Wilding is gone, and the others are all of them dead; but some stories still remain to be cleared off. There was the old farmer at the tithe dinner, who, on having some bread-sauce handed to him, extracted a great “dollop” on the top of his knife, tasted it, and said, “Don’t chüse none.” There was the other who remarked of a particular pudding, that he “could rise in the night-time and eat it”; and there was the third, who, supposing he should get but one plate, shovelled his fish-bones under the table. There was the boy in Monk Soham school who, asked to define an earthquake, said, “It is when the ’arth shug itself, and swallow up the ’arth”; and there was his schoolmate, who said that “America was discovered by British Columbia.” There
was old Mullinger of Earl Soham, who thought it “wrong of fŏoks to go up in a ballune, as that fare [33] so bumptious to the Almighty.” There was the actual balloon, which had gone up somewhere in the West of England, and which came down in (I think) the neighbouring parish of Bedfield. As it floated over Monk Soham, the aeronaut shouted, “Where am I?” to some harvesters, who, standing in a row, their forefingers pointed at him, shouted back, “Yeou’re in a ballune, bor.” There was old X., who, whenever my father visited him, would grumble, talk scandal, and abuse all his neighbours, always, however, winding up piously with “But ’tis well.” There was the boy whom my father put in the stocks, but who escaped by unlacing his “high-lows,” and so withdrawing his feet. There was the clergyman, preaching in a strange church, who asked to have a glass of water in the pulpit, and who, after the sermon, remarked to the clerk in the vestry, “That might have been gin-and-water, John, for all the people could tell.” And, taking the duty again there next Sunday, he found to his horror it was gin-and-water: “I took the hint, sir—I took the hint,” quoth John, from the clerk’s desk below. There was the Monk Soham woman who, when she got a letter from her son in Hull, told the curate that “that did give me a tarn at fust,
for I thought that come from the hot place.” There was another Monk Soham woman who told my sister one day that she had been reading in the Bible “about that there gal Haggar,” and who, after discussing the story of Hagar, went on, “When that gal grew up she went and preached to some fooks in a city that were livin’ bad lives.” My sister did not know about this, so inquired where she had found it, and she turned to the Book of the Prophet Haggai—Hagar and Haggai to her were one and the same. There was the manufacturer of artificial manures who set up a carriage and crest; and a friend asked my father what the motto would be. “Mente et manu res,” was the ready answer. There was the concert at Ipswich, where the chairman, a very precise young clergyman, announced that “the Rev. Robert Groome will sing (ahem!) ‘Thomas Bowling.’” The song was a failure; my father each time was so sorely tempted to adopt the new version. There was the old woman whom my father heard warning her daughter, about to travel for the first time by rail, “Whativer yeou do, my dear, mind yeou don’t sit nigh the biler.” There was the old maiden lady, who every morning after breakfast read an Ode of Horace; and the other maiden lady, a kinswoman of my father’s, who practised her scales regularly long after she was sixty.